Salon.com > Land mines

One way Obama can earn his Nobel Peace Prize

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 01:15:00 +0000

Many people are troubled that Barack Obama flew to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize so soon after escalating the war in Afghanistan. He is now more than doubling the number of troops there when George W. Bush left office.

The irony was not lost on the president, and he tried to address it in his Nobel acceptance speech. "I am responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land," he said. "Some will kill. Some will be killed. And so I come here with an acute sense of the cost of armed conflict -- filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other."

Granted, there's a gap here between the rhetoric and the reality. But there's always been something askew about Nobel Peace Prize, in no small part because it's given in the name of the man who invented dynamite, one of the most powerful and destructive weapons in the human arsenal.

It was rumored that after Alfred Nobel brought his version of Frankenstein's creature into the world, he was torn by guilt, his shame said to have intensified when a French newspaper prematurely ran his obituary with the headline "The Merchant of Death Is Dead." The article vilified him as a man "who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before."

What the tsunami dragged in

Tue, 08 Mar 2005 01:09:00 +0000

When Naba Vavuniyu goes to sleep at night, the monsters under his bed are real.

A handsome 23-year-old, Vavuniyu is a team leader with the Danish Demining Group in Kuchchaveli, on Sri Lanka's northeast coast. For $110 a month -- roughly the salary of a high school teacher in this underdeveloped country -- he spends four hours each day combing the village streets and pastures for mines uprooted by the tsunami.

To date, there have no reports of Sri Lankans killed by the newly exposed mines. The only victim has been a cow that wandered into a clearly marked minefield. Yet 94 P-4 mines -- the size and shape of hockey pucks, with a plunger on top -- have been recovered. Most have been detonated. But several dozen, their fuses removed, are stored in a red wooden crate beneath Vavuniyu's bed.

"There's no place else to put them," he shrugs. The deactivated mines, he says, pose no hazard, unless the temperature in the barracks rises above 80 degrees Celsius (176 degrees Fahrenheit).

Newsreal: Purveyor of catastrophe

Fri, 05 Dec 1997 20:00:00 +0000

Even without America's signature, the treaty to ban the use of land mines, signed in Ottawa on Wednesday, is a crowning achievement for a worldwide grass-roots group, the Nobel Peace prize-winning International Campaign to Ban land mines. However, the U.S. has said it will stop using land mines everywhere except in Korea, and will come up with a plan to replace land mines there by 2006. Many analysts expect that continuing moral pressure will ultimately force the U.S. to sign the treaty.

Could the same pressure from ordinary people be applied to a much larger threat to lives and peace -- the continuing deployment of large weapons systems, mostly by the United States, and particularly in the Middle East? This is a question posed by John Tirman in his new book, "Spoils of War: The Human Cost of America's Arms Trade" (Free Press).